Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin wants the Justice Department used not to enforce the law, but to terrify young Americans out of serving in government.
That's not an interpretation. She said it outright. Speaking at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics last week during a live taping of Vox's "America, Actually!" podcast, the former CIA analyst told the audience that Democrats should prosecute Trump administration officials specifically to create a "deterrence message" for the next generation of conservatives.
"I want young people coming out of school to say, 'Should I go work for the Trump administration? That sounds fun, I might get an opportunity,'" Slotkin said. "I want them to be like, 'Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems I don't want, and so let me avoid participating in that.'"
Slotkin stressed that Democrats should pursue "signature cases" against Trump's enablers rather than focusing solely on the president, noting that while Trump has presidential immunity, "the people around Donald Trump who are doing his bidding and enabling this have no such immunity."
She wasn't speaking off the cuff. In a September 30 address to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Slotkin compared the prosecution strategy to Poland's post-authoritarian "Iron Broom" program and named specific targets: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro. Misusing taxpayer money, she told that audience, "can land you a sentence of up to 20 years in prison," according to Breitbart.
Conservatives erupted. University of Chicago student Michael Bicksel posted on X that Slotkin told him and other conservative students "we should live in fear of political persecution if we dare serve our country in the Trump administration," adding: "Sadly for her, we will never be intimidated by her Bolshevik-style tactics." GOP operative Nathan Brand called the remarks "gross."
But here's the context neither party wants to dwell on. Slotkin's call for selective prosecution comes months after she was herself in the crosshairs of a Trump Justice Department. Pirro's office sought to indict Slotkin and five other Democratic lawmakers over a 90-second video urging military members to refuse illegal orders—footage Trump called "seditious" and "punishable by death." A federal grand jury declined to return an indictment in February.
So the weapon runs both ways. When Trump's DOJ came for Slotkin, a grand jury stopped it. Now Slotkin's answer isn't to dismantle the weapon—it's to seize it and aim it at the other side's staff.
Trump, for his part, told Newsmax he's considering mass pardons for administration officials, saying he doesn't want people who work for him to "go through years of nonsense, hire lawyers and everything else, all for nothing."
The question isn't whether corruption should be prosecuted. It's whether prosecution should be deployed as a political deterrent—a tool to make an entire class of citizens afraid to serve their government. Slotkin just answered yes. The founders fought a revolution over a government that used the law to intimidate its subjects into compliance.
